Bye-bye Bottlenecks: Ensuring Safe Passage for Salmon in Maine

By Lauri Munroe-Hultman

Don’t you hate it when you’re cruising along the Interstate and “Lane Closed Ahead” signs start popping up? Soon, a sea of brake lights appears, and traffic slows to a crawl, as cars squeeze through the narrowed roadway. Suddenly, getting where you want to go is much more difficult.

Perhaps this is how an Atlantic salmon feels when, making its way upstream to spawn, the waterway funnels to a small opening under a road. Its journey, one programmed into its DNA and necessary for the survival of the species, becomes many times harder than expected, if not impossible.

Undersized culverts like this one on a tributary to the Upper Sandy River in Phillips, Maine, hinder upstream migration of fish such as Atlantic salmon and Eastern brook trout and cause road washouts. Credit: USFWS

Maine’s aging roadways are littered with undersized culverts that prevent safe passage of fish and other animals and cause costly washouts during storms. Thanks to a recent grant from the Federal government, however, many outdated culverts will be replaced with wider archways that allow water and wildlife to pass more easily.

In December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) awarded $6 million to replace several hundred undersized culverts on private forestland in northern and eastern Maine and restore about 250 miles of waterway. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is one of the principal partners in the five-year Maine Aquatic Connectivity Restoration Project that involves large forestland owners, tribal nations, conservation groups and local operators.

The project is the nation’s top-ranked funding agreement through the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) administered by NRCS. It’s one of 88 high-impact projects across the country that will receive $225 million in Federal funding.

The Service worked with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to set restoration priorities and draft the project proposal. The agency will contribute more than $1.3 million, and staff will help with surveys and assessments, engineering and conceptual designs, environmental compliance, fish removal, project management and monitoring activities.

In addition to the Service and TNC, project partners include Project SHARE, Maine Audubon, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Penobscot Indian Nation, the Houlton Band of Maliseets and the Passamaquoddy Indian Nations. As a group, the partners have pledged to match or exceed the $6 million contribution to Maine’s infrastructure.

In a typical restoration, workers remove an old, rusted culvert, perhaps three-to-four feet in diameter, and replace it with a larger arch or bridge similar in width to upstream and downstream stretches. The resulting natural stream bed and water depth and flow let fish pass through easily. Other wildlife, such as beaver, mink, muskrats, turtles, snakes and frogs, can cross under the roadway via dry banks inside of the structure. The wider passageway can accommodate floodwaters, protecting the road during storms.

The completed project offers improved fish passage and increased protection against flooding. Credit: USFWS

The project will focus on waterways with some of the last endangered Atlantic salmon populations in the United States and critical Eastern brook trout habitat. Undersized culverts hinder the migration of these species, often keeping them from important spawning and rearing areas upstream.

While employing construction workers in the short-term, the project also will increase road stability and safety throughout Maine’s forestlands, supporting the forest industry, recreation and local economies. Healthy rivers and streams offer clean drinking water and enhanced sport fishing. Maine’s tribes will gain access to subsistence fishing, and downstream fisheries as far as the coast will benefit from improved water quality.

Service staff from the Gulf of Maine Coastal Program, Maine Field Office of Ecological Services and Moosehorn and Lake Umbagog national wildlife refuges worked together to remove the old culvert and replace it with a 12-foot-wide concrete arch. Credit: USFWS

Jed Wright, project leader of the Service’s Gulf of Maine Coastal Program, is excited to work with partners to increase the pace of restoring stream connectivity in Maine. “We’re committed to helping private landowners implement great projects by providing funding, conducting site surveys, designing replacement structures, and ensuring that construction will have minimal impact on fish and their habitats,” Wright said.

“With over 11 million acres of Maine forest in private hands,” added Kate Dempsey, state director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine, “this project stands ultimately to influence stream-friendly management on thousands of miles of some of the best aquatic habitat in the East and spur innovations and efficiencies to influence restoration even more broadly nationally as we and our partners share lessons from this project.”

And that means more waterways with smooth sailing for species traveling upstream. Now, if we could do something about those Interstate bottlenecks….

(Lauri Munroe-Hultman is a writer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Hadley, Mass.)

Flying high: Scientists work to protect a flying squirrel and its red spruce home

Today’s story comes from The Nature Conservancy Magazine. Author Madeline Bodin shares the recovery story of the West Virginia northern flying squirrel and the ongoing work to monitor the species and restore its red spruce home. Our agency removed the flying squirrel from the endangered species list in March 2013. In 1985, only 10 squirrels were captured in four separate areas of its range. Now, federal and state biologists have captured more than 1,100 squirrels at over 100 sites, and believe that this subspecies no longer faces the threat of extinction.

Scientists measured, weighed and put a radio collar on this West Virginia northern flying squirrel before releasing it into the wild. © Patrick Cavan Brown for The Nature Conservancy.

Craig Stihler holds the squirming rodent in his gloved hands. “It’s a biter,” warns the bespectacled biologist as he handles the animal using only calm, deliberate movements. With its impossibly large eyes built for seeing in the dark, the West Virginia northern flying squirrel looks and acts like an agitated Muppet.

And rightfully so: A few minutes ago, this young female specimen was napping in one of hundreds of nest boxes that Stihler and other researchers installed throughout the Monongahela National Forest. But now she’s being weighed, ear-tagged and measured by a small group of scientists.

Virginia Tech doctoral student Corinne Diggins prepares live traps to capture and study West Virginia northern flying squirrels. © Patrick Cavan Brown for The Nature Conservancy

One of them—Virginia Tech doctoral student Corinne Diggins—blows in the squirrel’s face, trying to stop it from writhing in Stihler’s hand long enough for her to slip a radio collar around its neck. The animal finally holds still after a Forest Service technician gamely offers the finger of his glove for the squirrel to gnaw on, which allows Diggins to crimp the collar in place. Once she is done, Stihler releases the squirrel onto a tree trunk. It darts up into the canopy, then freezes in place, waiting for the group to leave.

A biologist with the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, Stihler has held more West Virginia northern flying squirrels than just about anyone. He has been studying the animals since 1985, when this subspecies of the northern flying squirrel was listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. At the time, scientists could find the squirrel at only a handful of sites in West Virginia, and its only known habitat had been reduced to a small fraction of its historical footprint in the area. To make things worse, not much was known about the animal—including what it ate, where it slept and how it differed from its more common cousin, the northern flying squirrel, which ranges across North America. With so few of the feisty, nocturnal animals to study, figuring out why the squirrel had declined—let alone how to save it—was going to require some sleuthing.

Researchers Corinne Diggins and Craig Stihler attach a radio collar to a West Virginia northern flying squirrel after measuring and weighing it. © Patrick Cavan Brown for The Nature Conservancy.

Only three decades later, the outlook for the flying squirrel’s survival has changed dramatically. The species is no longer endangered and was delisted in 2013—a remarkable feat, given how few squirrels remained and how little was known about them. The story of the squirrel’s turnaround isn’t about saving just one species; it’s the story of the restoration of an entire landscape that had become unbalanced by more than a century of logging and mining.

The West Virginia northern flying squirrel is a rare sight in the wild. Compared with the typical gray squirrel you might see in your yard, the flying squirrel is smaller, lighter, active at night and can soar through the air. It uses folds of skin, called patagia, that stretch between its front and hind legs to glide from tree to tree. It is so adept with these “wings” that it can execute 180-degree turns in midair.

Before the 1980s, scientists had observed this high-flying rodent scratching out a meager living eating tree buds, lichens and mushrooms. But it wasn’t until the subspecies was listed as endangered that researchers uncovered the mainstay of its diet: truffles—or a close approximation from the genus Elaphomyces. These truffle-like fungi grow below ground, entwined in the roots of trees commonly found in the high-elevation red spruce forests of central Appalachia’s Allegheny Mountains. Further investigation found that the trees, fungi and squirrels were mutually dependent: The fungi and the trees exchange nutrients, and the squirrels eat the fungi and spread their spores to new areas.

“You can’t underestimate the importance of the relationship between the forest, the fungi and the squirrel,” says Donna Mitchell, the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources biologist who conducted research on the subspecies’ diet—work that offered major clues toward understanding the animal’s decline. “I’m not sure what you would do without one of those components.”

Researcher Corinne Diggins sets traps in a variety of spruce and hardwood locations to account for the West Virginia northern flying squirrel’s foraging and denning habits. © Patrick Cavan Brown for The Nature Conservancy.

A second piece of the puzzle came into place when the U.S. Geological Survey published a report finding that the Allegheny Mountains’ spruce forests were among the most endangered ecosystems in the United States. The forests had been reduced to just 10 percent of their former range.

“This was a spruce-driven ecosystem, with a million acres of spruce-influenced forest,” says Shane Jones, a biologist with the Monongahela National Forest, looking out at a mountainous horizon that today shows only small patches of red spruce. “Then in the 1800s, mass timber extraction arrived with the railroad logging era.” Not only were the trees cut down, but sparks from the trains’ engines ignited fires in the hillsides, which were littered with slash from timber cutting. Having thin bark, a shallow root system and small seeds that burn easily, the red spruce is poorly adapted to fires. Eventually the hardwood trees, such as beech, maple and oak, grew back; the spruces didn’t.

For most of the past century, that situation suited the Forest Service. Maples, cherries and oaks were more valuable as timber. But as the flying squirrel mobilized local conservation groups—including The Nature Conservancy—during the 1980s and ’90s, they found that the red spruce forest held this ecosystem together. The trees shaded trout streams, provided habitat for an endangered salamander and supported the West Virginia northern flying squirrel.

The first step in restoring the squirrel population, then, was securing its remaining habitat: Logging was halted in areas of the national forest that could support the squirrels. The second was developing and implementing a restoration plan for the red spruce forest.

Since the early 1990s, the Conservancy has helped the Forest Service protect more than 65,800 acres of scattered parcels within national forest boundaries. The largest deal occurred in 2000, when the Conservancy coordinated the purchase of mineral rights for 57,300 acres on the flanks of Cheat Mountain, situated on the forest’s western edge. The Forest Service already owned the surface of the land, but a mining company owned the mineral rights, which meant it could tear up the forest to get to the coal. Once secured, the mineral rights were transferred to the Forest Service. … Finish reading this story at The Nature Conservancy Magazine!

The promise of Penobscot

Today you’re hearing from Kate Dempsey, the External Affairs Director for The Nature Conservancy in Maine. Photo courtesy of Kate.

At first glance, the dams along Penobscot River don’t look particularly imposing. But to an Atlantic salmon, each dam is as daunting as the Great Wall of China, blocking the route to hundreds of miles of their historic spawning habitat. Salmon that manage to climb the fish ladders emerge exhausted. For fish like shad, rainbow smelt and striped bass, the upstream side of the dam might as well be the far side of the moon. But that is all changing, thanks to the promise made through the Penobscot River Restoration Project.

Today, when I stand along the Penobscot River where the Great Works Dam used to hold back this mighty river, I have to catch my breath.

The former Great Works Dam site. Photo courtesy of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust.

It’s still hard to believe that 1000-foot wide concrete dam is now gone and people are kayaking the rapids and fish are swimming through the rips. I shout over the roar of flowing water.

This summer, as the Veazie Dam starts coming down, I’m watching eagerly as the construction vehicles maneuver through the water securing the promise of a free-flowing entire lower section of the Penobscot River. By next year the river will flow freely from the first natural falls clear to Penobscot Bay for the first time in more than 180 years.

A photo of Veazie Dam by the Penobscot River Restoration Trust.

For me, the Penobscot Project has become more than just part of my day job, it embodies what I believe we need to be considering in all of our lives: How do communities, businesses, governments and organizations work to create solutions that meet a variety of needs. And how can nature help solve those problems?

Carefully removing dams from the Penobscot solves a host of problems. Scientists believe the Penobscot represents the last best hope for recovery of Atlantic salmon in the United States. When the project is complete, access to nearly 1,000 miles of habitat will be greatly improved for 11 species of native sea-run fish, including Atlantic salmon, American shad, two river herring and American eel.

Lower river species such as endangered shortnose sturgeon, threatened Atlantic sturgeon, striped bass, and rainbow smelt will have 100 percent of their historic spawning and juvenile growing habitat restored. Increases in river herring will likely expand the food supply for many commercially important species in the Gulf of Maine that prey on these smaller fish, including cod and haddock.

From the expansive forests and streams of across Maine to the Penobscot estuary to the Gulf of Maine, restored fish populations will have cascading benefits for whole communities of plants, animals and people. And the Penobscot Settlement Agreement ensures the river will continue to provide low-carbon electricity to local communities.

Wait – there’s more! We’re sharing videos and posts all season from our staff and partners working on the Penobscot River.

Because of our willingness to work persistently together, to find places of common ground and places to compromise, we are taking out the Veazie Dam this summer and we will finish the Penobscot Project together in the coming years. And that is delivering on a promise.